Sixty thousand people vied to attend the unveiling of Amazon?s first smartphone in late June.
If only the retailer could persuade those fans ? or anyone, really ? to actually buy the device. The Amazon Fire is threatening to become the Amazon Fizzle.
On Monday, Amazon took a drastic step to avert disaster, announcing that it would charge 99 cents for the phone, basically giving it away if users signed a two-year contract with AT&T, the exclusive carrier.
Amazon has money to burn, and a relentless determination. But some analysts still wondered if a price drop of almost $200 was enough.
?If history is any indication, this doesn?t usually work,? said Wayne Lam, a senior analyst with IHS Technology. He noted that the so-called Facebook phone quickly dropped to 99 cents last year but never gained a foothold in the market.
The price cut gets the Fire phone closer to the company?s classic model of giving away hardware in the expectation that users will order enough from Amazon to make it worthwhile. Buyers of the phone still get a year of free Prime, Amazon?s shipping and video club, which normally costs $99.
The Fire, released in late July, is an expensive venture for Amazon. Thousands of employees worked on it for four years. Analysts initially expected sales of one million to two million units in the first year.
That is not much in the smartphone universe. Apple, which is releasing its new iPhones on Tuesday, surpasses that every week. But the Fire was nevertheless unlikely to get anywhere near its forecast in its initial incarnation.
Amazon does not release sales numbers for its devices and declined to comment for this article. An AT&T spokesman also declined to comment on sales.
But at three Bay Area AT&T stores over the weekend, salesmen said that the Fire had performed dismally. ?We got special shirts, staffed up for the launch ? and then nothing,? said one salesman, who estimated his store had sold a total of 10 Fire phones. At a smaller store, two salesmen said they had sold exactly one Fire.
When Jeff Bezos, Amazon?s founder and chief executive, introduced the phone in Seattle to the news media and a few of those 60,000 avid members of the public, he said the Fire team had been guided by these questions: ?How would the phone be different? Can we build a better phone for our most-engaged customers? Can we build a better phone for Amazon Prime members??
One way the phone was different was with its Dynamic Perspective feature, which enhanced maps, shopping and games. Firefly, which identified products and made it easy to order them from Amazon, was another innovation.
But in reviews on Amazon?s site, customers said the parts that were different were not necessarily good, and the parts that were good ? call clarity, for one thing ? were not enough to outweigh things like a short battery life and a tendency to overheat. And there were other issues: ?If you use this phone, you are inviting Amazon to know all the details of your life.?
A quarter of the reviewers of the Fire gave it one star, which Amazon translates as ?I hate it.?
Other reviewers sounded a theme not of anger but of sadness.
Amazon said on Monday that earlier buyers should contact customer service to apply for a refund. An AT&T spokesman said that it had a 14-day return policy, meaning that the handful of customers who bought directly from the carrier in the first month were out of luck.